He'd nearly lost her, and despite his bravado, despite the image he'd created for himself as a fearless, no-nonsense leader… he was scared.
Scared he'd never see her again, scared that he'd die lying limp on the tusk of an alien mad with the overbearance of nature, and the last thing he'd ever see would be her eyes. She should have never looked so pale, not with her big caramel bands, wide and filled with red- burning red. Rachel was golden locks and the warmth of a cardigan tucked over the shoulders, like the dying man he was. He took a strand and curled it around one finger, taking not one inch of bliss but twenty, one for each year it took him to kiss her.
She looked for the world like a saint, hair splayed over white satin, his sheets over her chest, her hand over his chest. He sat up and reached for her hand, tucked it under his so he could keep her there, even as he watched over her. He'd never loved like this, never kissed the way he'd kissed her. He wondered if he'd been good at what they'd done, fancied he'd ask when she woke up, just to see her smile, brace for the smack on his arm. He hoped she'd be able to see what he was thinking, glasses long abandoned somewhere on his ship room floor. She'd been the grafter who'd tossed them haphazardly wherever, and he'd been the gambit, merely glad she'd stolen from him.
He hoped she'd see in him the regard and the sentiment, the piety and rapture she'd been so grievously unbinding within him for the better part of a decade. He wondered, briefly, if the same had happened to Wally in the time they'd been gone from Earth, if he'd finally allowed himself to think, feel, say the things he'd always wanted to- it was liberating.
And when caramel eyes parted and peered back at him in the empty light of the stars in space, so inconsequential compared to their bed and the afterglow, he'd tell her about it. He'd tell her he wanted for nothing, hounded for nothing, when she was by his side. He was the best, would stay the best, so long as her hand was his to hold; and it sounded poetic and idyllic, but that was merely because that was the nature of the kid he'd become. Space did that to a guy.
His alarm went off, blaring, continuous and aggravating, one horn after another. (Usually, it was a staple of Earth he clung to, how he kept track of days in a ship that never shifted in light). She woke to him pressing the snooze button, and laughed as he wrapped an arm around her waist and pulled her skin flush to his own, eyebrows wiggling.
"I could get in serious trouble for having a girl in my quarters…"
She laughed. "Good morning to you too, soldier."
If he'd known that was the last time he'd ever kiss her, he'd have made it last forever.